Zionists Accused of Collaborating

June 16, 1983

LONDON (Jun. 15)

Two Jewish members of the recently established “Anti-Zionist Committee of the Jewish Public” clashed at the committee’s June 6 press conference in Moscow where it was alleged, among other things, that all Jews desirous of leaving the Soviet Union have already left.

The clash, according to the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the research arm of the World Jewish Congress, was between Samuel Zivs and Yuri Kolesnikov and the subject was not emigration but alleged Zionist collaboration with the Nazis during World War II.

Zivs was questioned at the press conference about “The Class Essence of Zionism,” published in Kiev last year by the hardline Soviet propagandist, Lev Korneyev, which alleges widespread collaboration between Zionists and Nazis. Zivs responded that the Committee “will struggle against improper expositions in such booklets that unfortunately do appear.”

But Kolesnikov, himself the author of novels on “Zionist-Nazi collaboration” defended Korneyev’s work. He claimed that during the war, the Zionists “not only failed to protect their co-religionists but betrayed them, wholly in league with the gestapo and SS.” He claimed that Adolf Eichmann was executed by the Israelis to prevent the “sacred secrets” of this collaboration from becoming public.

JEWS BLAMED FOR ANTI-SEMITISM

Tony Lerman, senior research officer of the IJA, noted that Korneyev’s booklet also claims that Zionists and Jews are partly responsible for violent anti-Semitism in Europe from the Czarist pogroms to the Nazi Holocaust; the idea that all Jews are citizens of a Jewish nation “automatically puts Jews in the role of a fifth column in any state;” and that Zionist agents provoked the Russian and Ukrainian pogroms before World War I “in order to increase emigration from the country.”

According to Lerman, Korneyev’s latest work denies that six million Jews perished in the Holocaust, indicating that Soviet propagandists are adopting a line that has been pushed up to now only by neo-Nazis and extreme rightwing groups.

Korneyev’s booklet, “On the Path of Aggression and Racism,” 100,000 copies of which have been published by the Pravda Publishing House in Moscow, says the six million figure is a two or three fold exaggeration by the Zionists.

Korneyev deliberately misquated a speech by Chaim Weizmann in 1937 in which the Zionist leader warned that the lives of six million Jews were in danger, Lerman said. The writer claims the figure given by Weizmann “became the basis of the legend of the ‘total destruction’ of the Jews by the Nazis.”

Korneyev also claims that most countries in the world did not shut their doors to Jewish refugees before and during the war. It was those countries in which “Zionist” influence was strongest that opposed Jewish immigration, the Soviet propagandist wrote.